barry soookman Archives

Copyright Board values music used in online music services

Did you ever wonder what online music services like iTunes, Slacker, Rdio, Zik, and Songza pay for the music they use? On Friday, the Copyright Board released its decision in the SOCAN 22.A and CSI Online Music Services tariffs. The tariffs establish rates that music services must pay to music publishers for the communication to the public and reproduction rights in musical works for services that offer the following types of online music services:

Permanent downloads – a service that sells and distributes copies of sound recordings of musical works to a device such as a computer, cell phone, Smartphone, or iPod.

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Did the Supreme Court eviscerate Access Copyright’s business model? A reply to Michael Geist

Michael Geist in a series of recent blog posts claims that the decisions of the Supreme Court in the SOCAN v. Bell Canada, 2012 SCC 36 (SOCAN v Bell) and Alberta (Education) v. Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright), 2012 SCC 37 (Access Copyright) cases eviscerated Access Copyright’s business model.[1] He asserts that the cases make all copying that would be subject to a license from Access Copyright fair dealings. Moreover, he claims that publishers would not suffer significant economic harm if all copying permitted under Access Copyright licenses or model licenses were fair dealings and no educational institution, whether elementary, secondary, or post-secondary, paid a penny for all such uses.

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Understanding Flava Works v myVidster: does inline linking infringe copyright?

Last week, the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals released its opinion in the Flava Works, Inc, v Gunter dba myVidster 2012 WL 3124826 (7^th.Cir. Aug 2, 2012) case. The central issue was whether Flava Works, the owner of copyrights in videos, was entitled to a preliminary injunction against the social video bookmarking service myVidster. The injunction which had been granted by the District Court was vacated.

Some commentators have construed the decision as a ruling that embedding or inline linking to a copyright-infringing video on another web site does not infringe copyright[1].…

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US court: Google book settlement not “fair, adequate and reasonable”

U.S. Judge Denny Chin released his decision today on whether to approve the class action settlement with Google involving the Google book scanning project. Judge Chin rejected the settlement as not being fair, adequate, and reasonable.

His 48 page reasons were summarized as follows:

While the digitization of books and the creation of a universal digital library would benefit many, the ASA would simply go too far. It would permit this class action – which was brought against defendant Google Inc.

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